Kingsfan.com Official Gameday Thread
Game 57
Sacramento Kings versus Houston Rockets
Game 57
Sacramento Kings versus Houston Rockets
By Stephen Tetsu, Kingsfans.com Official Something-or-other
Two wins in a row. Everyone stop abandoning ship! Pull the lifeboats back up! Cancel the S.O.S calls! Stop trying to barter sex for life-vests! The ship is still afloat!
Sure the two wins came against two teams missing their best players who just so happen to play at the position we absolutely seem incapable of defending but a victory doesn't count less because of how it happened and a victory against a bad team counts the same as a victory against a good team in the win-loss column.
The Big Three pretty much turned out to be the only three on Sunday but that was all we needed as Demarcus, Rudy, and IT pummelled the bejeezus out of the Nuggets in the second half, simply kicking the poopoo out of all comers on both ends of the court.
After an off-game against the annoyingly physical Celtics, Demarcus seemed less rusty against the pedestrian Nuggets frontline. In the third quarter, someone exhumed Bill Russell's grave and his spirit inhabited Demarcus's body as he went bonkers and started blocking everythign to the tune of five for the entire night.
Meanwhile, the spirit of Alex English, still haunting the Kings' practice facility, inhabited Rudy Gay's body as the man dropped bucket after bucket on the helpless Nuggets defense.
Isaiah was oddly efficient for the night, scoring thirty points on 16 shots (going to completely disregard the pedestrian 1 to 1 assist to turnover ratio) to overpower the Nuggets and their extra small point guard rotation.
Observations- Fun with Numbers: After his stint in the second quarter, Reggie Evans has a rather insane per-36 rebounding stat of 22.5 as a King. Normally I'd laugh it off and say that such a rate isn't sustainable but Reggie's single basketball skill is an innate ability to rebound the ball. While I won't go as far as saying our perpetual rebounding problem has finally been solved, with the exception of maybe Carl Landry, who has been surprisingly solid at rebounding this season, this is the first time since maybe 2005 where we haven't had a collection of big men allergic to rebounding.
- While the numbers don't really show it, I thought Ray McCallum looked solid enough during his stints in the last two games. Seeing as how he's a second round rookie who's suddenly gone from playing no minutes whatsoever to seeing 14 minutes a night since we traded Marcus Thornton, I'm willing to cut him some slack. While the numbers don't really indicate much at this point, Ray's done a good job of at least trying to pressure the other team's point guard. On offense, Ray is definitely not Isaiah Thomas (take from that what you will), willing to take a more passive role on that side of the ball (while also not possessing IT's explosive scoring ability). That all said, he's still a very raw prospect that requires a lot more seasoning, the likes of which he can only get by playing actual NBA minutes every night. So while watching him and Ben do dumb things now may be incredibly painful, just keep in mind that we're doing so in the hopes of keeping such from happening in the future.
- Speaking of Ben, I think we're starting to see flashes of the potential that made our front office take him as the seventh pick in the draft. At times, he's been more aggressive attacking the hoop than we've seen earlier in the year, something that has been made possible because his dribbling ability has improved from three-year-old-touching-a-basketball-for-the-first-time to dude-trying-out-for-his-middle-school-JV-team. While his shooting percentage remains a disappointment, his good stroke from the free throw line and the general form of his shooting stroke still makes me think that, once he stops doing things at 100-mph the entire time, it will eventually start to fall. Once again, he's raw. I'm willing to give him more time. Not having to deal with MT might help him too.
- Derrick Williams continues to be consistently inconsistent. Some nights he looks like a number two pick, others he looks like the guy picked second from last in the pick-up game down at the Y.
Tonight's game.
Twenty years ago, this happened...
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
